Lost Girl Found: On the Cold Wet Floor

Chapter 1

It’s January of 2022 and I’m sitting on the floor of my bathroom, shivering in a towel, whispering under my breath “you’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.” My vision has blacked out and I can’t feel my hands or legs. This episode began in the shower. I felt thrown off balance and my vision glitched for the briefest of seconds, just enough to cause me to think: “you might faint” followed by “over my dead body.” My stubbornness has become a burden in situations like this. I refuse to yield to what my body needs. Why should I rush through the precious moments of peace I have in my day because my body decided to turn against me? I have approximately three minutes to get out before I go down. I rush through washing my hair, skip shaving my legs and rinse everything off while keeping one hand glued to the wall for stability. My eyes are trained on the tiles in front of me and I’m mentally calculating the steps I need to take before my world shuts down: Towel, water, phone to call for help, floor.

Turning off the water, I manage to grab a towel before my legs give way. I hold onto the sink’s edge as I lower myself to the floor. I’ve curled into a ball, fighting off the waves dizziness threatening to render me unconscious. “You’re okay. You’re okay.” I repeat over and over again as I try to move my hands, try to wiggle my fingers and try not to panic when I realize I can’t feel anything.

I can still feel the wet bathmat under me as I put my head down onto my knees and push away the urge to cry. I feel the adrenaline coursing through my body and I know this one will be bad. They’re always bad but this particular one will leave me leaning up against the cabinet of the bathroom sink, trying to remain conscious. I raise my head and look around at what I could potentially hit if I were to tip over when I faint. I clock the corner of a bathroom rack holding my hairdryer. I notice that I left the shower door open and if I fall backwards into the shower I could smash my head on the tile. I use all the strength I have to move myself as far away from danger as I can get and I wait. I wait for my body to go through what it needs to go through. I wait through the quiet numbness, the shaking and the tears. I wait through the moment of utter panic when everything happens at once where I’m not sure if I’m going to throw up, faint, or do both and wonder if I should go to the hospital. I wait through the fear that my mom is going to find me on this bathroom floor and what that will do to her. I wait through the depths of sadness I experience knowing this isn’t the first or the last time I’ll go through this.

When it’s done I roll onto my hands and knees and I crawl out of the bathroom, my wet towel hanging limply from my body. I crawl down the hall to my bed and pause at the foot of it trying to figure out if I have enough strength to climb into it or if I should just stay here on the floor. I manage to get myself into bed, never standing all the way up. Somehow my body is stuck in a collapsed fetal position. The simple act of moving the three feet from the ground to the mattress make me want to throw up. I force myself under the covers and onto my left side, pushing down the bile and pushing away the dizziness.

“You’re okay, you’re okay.” I whisper under my breath as I finally give in to where my body wants me to go. And as I go in and out of consciousness all I can think is, “God, let this be the time it kills me because I can’t do this anymore.”

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It may be shocking to hear but I used to be healthy. I used to be a yoga girl twisting myself this way and that in an effort to find peace and overcome some demons. I used to walk miles around Manhattan never experiencing fatigue and I used to be able to endure many things that perhaps, no body should endure in the first place.

I initially thought my skillset to go through hard things with little feeling was a gift. I’d commend myself silently about my ability to experience physical pain in yoga poses without complaining. I prided myself on how compliant my body was to yielding to where my mind wanted it to go. But I was recently in a somatic therapy session when I realized my ability to endure had done more damage than I realized.

As I sat in session, the practitioner began inching her chair closer to mine. This is a technique to see how comfortable I am with intimacy and what closeness feels like in my body. I have had negative sexual experiences in the past so testing my comfort levels with intimacy is both necessary and hard. I want to confront my trauma as much as I want to run away from it. As she inched closer to me, I could tell I was dissociating. It’s this sensation where I just leave myself completely. My legs go numb and my heart starts to race and suddenly I can’t see her clearly in front of me anymore. Noticing my discomfort, she switched tactics. Instead of embracing intimacy, she asked me to confront it by throwing pillows down on the floor and using my words to express my fear or anger about close connections.

I tried. I really did. I threw a pillow down and used the words she gave me and they didn’t feel right. I tried to say “I hate what you did to me” thinking back to a sexual assault. I tried to say “I hate who I became because of you” thinking back to the people whose validation I sought. In previous sessions I had great ease and force when it came to exercises like this. But this time, I was struggling. I knew the words I was being given weren’t in alignment  with what I was trying to express, a feeling or memory that had no name yet. I told her it wasn’t anger I was trying to express and it wasn’t fear. It was shame. She pushed back and told me I was afraid and that is when I finally became mad. Really, truly, mad. Because I know fear. It’s been my bedfellow for the last three years. I am well acquainted with what it feels like to be terrified whether it be because my physical safety was threatened or because my body stopped working the way it should. The last three years have shown me the different iterations of fear more times than I care to count. But this feeling bubbling up inside of me wasn’t fear. It was shame. Hot, pervasive, bile inducing shame.

She told me again, “it’s fear your feeling. You’re feeling fear you need to release.” In that moment something in me unlocked. Perhaps it was the anger I felt at being misunderstood or the frustration I had in myself for not gaining this awareness sooner. But in this moment of great clarity, I retrieved the memory that had been hidden in my subconscious for so long and spoke it into existence. And after I shared it with her, I didn’t feel any fear, any anger. I only felt relief.